Contents

Background and education

Denby grew up in New York City. He received a B.A. from Columbia University in 1965, and a masters from its journalism school in 1966.

Career

Journalism

In a modern corporate state, good and evil may not be clear, and many people wander around in a fog of compromise, torn between ambition and guilt.

David DenbyIn a December 20, 1982 review of the 1982 film The Verdict directed by Sidney Lumet.[2]

Denby began writing film criticism while a graduate student at Stanford University's Department of Communication.[3] He began his professional life in the early 1970s as an adherent of the film critic Pauline Kael—one of a group of film writers informally, and sometimes derisively, known as "the Paulettes."[4] Denby wrote for The Atlantic and New York before arriving at The New Yorker in the middle 1990s; at present, Denby splits his film duties with Anthony Lane, trading off week-by-week. The schedule allows both writers to explore a broad range of critical topics in the body of the magazine.

Books

Denby's Great Books (1996) is a non-fiction account of the Western canon-oriented Core Curriculum at his alma mater, Columbia University. Denby reenrolled after three decades, and the book operates as a kind of double portrait, as well as a sort of great-thinkers brush-up.[citation needed] In The New York Times, the writer Joyce Carol Oates called the book "a lively adventure of the mind," filled with "unqualified enthusiasm."[6]Great Books was a New York Times bestseller. In The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th century, Peter Watson called "Great Books," the "most original response to the culture wars."[7] The book has been published in 13 foreign editions.

In 2004, Denby published American Sucker, a memoir which details his investment misadventures in the dot-com stock market bubble, along with his own bust years as a divorcée from writer Cathleen Schine, leading to a major reassessment of his life. Allan Sloan in the New York Times called the author "formidably smart," while noting this paradox: "Mr. Denby is even smart enough to realize how paradoxical it is that he not only has a good, prestigious job, but that he is also in a position to make money by relating how he lost money in the stock market."[8]

Snark, Denby's latest book, is a polemical dissection of public speech.